2021-09-25 09:39:30 +08:00
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==================
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LD64 vs LLD-MACHO
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==================
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This doc lists all significant deliberate differences in behavior between LD64 and LLD-MachO.
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2022-03-11 07:33:18 +08:00
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String Literal Deduplication
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2022-01-20 08:30:52 +08:00
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****************************
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2022-03-11 07:33:18 +08:00
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LD64 always deduplicates string literals. LLD only does it when the ``--icf=``
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or the ``--deduplicate-literals`` flag is passed. Omitting deduplication by
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default ensures that our link is as fast as possible. However, it may also break
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some programs which have (incorrectly) relied on string deduplication always
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2022-01-20 15:59:12 +08:00
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occurring. In particular, programs which compare string literals via pointer
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2022-01-20 08:30:52 +08:00
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equality must be fixed to use value equality instead.
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[lld-macho] Align cstrings less conservatively
Previously, we aligned every cstring to 16 bytes as a temporary hack to
deal with https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/50135. However, it
was highly wasteful in terms of binary size.
To recap, in contrast to ELF, which puts strings that need different
alignments into different sections, `clang`'s Mach-O backend puts them
all in one section. Strings that need to be aligned have the .p2align
directive emitted before them, which simply translates into zero padding
in the object file. In other words, we have to infer the alignment of
the cstrings from their addresses.
We differ slightly from ld64 in how we've chosen to align these
cstrings. Both LLD and ld64 preserve the number of trailing zeros in
each cstring's address in the input object files. When deduplicating
identical cstrings, both linkers pick the cstring whose address has more
trailing zeros, and preserve the alignment of that address in the final
binary. However, ld64 goes a step further and also preserves the offset
of the cstring from the last section-aligned address. I.e. if a cstring
is at offset 18 in the input, with a section alignment of 16, then both
LLD and ld64 will ensure the final address is 2-byte aligned (since
`18 == 16 + 2`). But ld64 will also ensure that the final address is of
the form 16 * k + 2 for some k (which implies 2-byte alignment).
Note that ld64's heuristic means that a dedup'ed cstring's final address is
dependent on the order of the input object files. E.g. if in addition to the
cstring at offset 18 above, we have a duplicate one in another file with a
`.cstring` section alignment of 2 and an offset of zero, then ld64 will pick
the cstring from the object file earlier on the command line (since both have
the same number of trailing zeros in their address). So the final cstring may
either be at some address `16 * k + 2` or at some address `2 * k`.
I've opted not to follow this behavior primarily for implementation
simplicity, and secondarily to save a few more bytes. It's not clear to me
that preserving the section alignment + offset is ever necessary, and there
are many cases that are clearly redundant. In particular, if an x86_64 object
file contains some strings that are accessed via SIMD instructions, then the
.cstring section in the object file will be 16-byte-aligned (since SIMD
requires its operand addresses to be 16-byte aligned). However, there will
typically also be other cstrings in the same file that aren't used via SIMD
and don't need this alignment. They will be emitted at some arbitrary address
`A`, but ld64 will treat them as being 16-byte aligned with an offset of
`16 % A`.
I have verified that the two repros in https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/50135
work well with the new alignment behavior.
Fixes https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/54036.
Reviewed By: #lld-macho, oontvoo
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D121342
2022-03-11 04:04:31 +08:00
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String Alignment
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****************
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LLD is slightly less conservative about aligning cstrings, allowing it to pack
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them more compactly. This should not result in any meaningful semantic
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difference.
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2022-01-15 15:06:13 +08:00
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``-no_deduplicate`` Flag
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2022-03-11 07:33:18 +08:00
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************************
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2022-01-15 15:06:13 +08:00
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- LD64:
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* This turns off ICF (deduplication pass) in the linker.
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- LLD
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* This turns off ICF and string merging in the linker.
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2022-03-11 07:33:18 +08:00
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ObjC Symbols Treatment
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2021-09-25 09:39:30 +08:00
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**********************
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There are differences in how LLD and LD64 handle ObjC symbols loaded from archives.
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- LD64:
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2021-11-15 09:17:08 +08:00
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* Duplicate ObjC symbols from the same archives will not raise an error. LD64 will pick the first one.
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* Duplicate ObjC symbols from different archives will raise a "duplicate symbol" error.
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- LLD:
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* Duplicate symbols, regardless of which archives they are from, will raise errors.
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